Wednesday, May 25, 2016

In
Bernard Malamud's novel God's Grace, a modern rewriting of the biblical
flood story, the hero, when asked where stories come from, says, "from
other stories." Robert Coover's
first collection of short stories, Pricksongs and Descants, from which
"The Brother" is taken, consists of a number of stories based on
other stories--fairy tales, legends, folktales--all of which are made more
earthy and "real" than their mythic originals.

What
may have given Coover the idea for this story is the line in Genesis,
"This is the story of Noah" and the restrained and objective Hebraic
style of the biblical story of cataclysm.
For "The Brother" is the story of Noah's brother, told by him
in a folksy, working-man fashion.
Whereas Noah is less than human in his single-minded dedication to
following God's command, the brother is just an ordinary guy who loves his wife
and tries to support his family. Whereas
God fills the life of Noah, the deity is merely part of the everyday language
of the brother.

Coover's
treatment of the conflict between the sacred and the profane is thus quite
different from Herbert Gold's "Susanna at the Beach." There is something sympathetic and real about
the voice we hear in this story, certainly nothing of the corruption suggested
in the biblical story that made God destroy everyone except Noah and his wife
and children.

The scene in which the brother and his wife
drink wine and laugh at Noah's foolishness is, rather than a harsh Hebraic
criticism of the earthly, a modern celebration of the real and the earthy. As a result, when the brother is turned away
from the ark by Noah and finds his wife drowned, our reaction is quite
different than our reaction to the biblical story may be.

Although
Noah follows the "letter" of God's command that he should take only
his sons and their wives with him on the ark, his refusal to follow the
"spirit" of brotherhood and save his brother and his pregnant wife
suggests intolerable self-righteousness.
What Coover has done is transform the abstraction of what Genesis calls
corrupt humanity into the ordinarily human.
As a result, instead of rejoicing that such men as Noah, the one
blameless man of his time, survived the flood, we may regret that such men as
his brother did not.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."